Hybrid clouds are turning out to be the best way for enterprises to enable employees’ continued access to powerful on-demand public cloud resources without losing control over corporate data, corporate security, the ability to comply with legal requirements (e.g., ensuring employee and customer privacy), or the maintenance of legacy capabilities.

Public cloud + private cloud = necessity

After all, you’re not going to get line-of-business employees trying to do their jobs as effectively and efficiently as possible to cease their Shadow IT habits. They’ll invariably sign up for one of those quite excellent public cloud application services — whether you like it or not. Whether you even know it or not.

And odds are you can’t afford to devote your IT people’s limited time to building in-house replacements for such services. This makes a hybrid cloud architecture a necessity for most enterprises, since a hybrid cloud combines use ofContinue reading →

Given how much cloud apps can boost your business agility while reducing maintenance, labor, and capital costs, chances are you’re spending a sizeable chunk of your IT budget on them (probably more than you realize).

You’re not alone. Industry watcher IDC predicts that in just a couple of years, at least half of all IT spending will be cloud-based, and by 2020, 60%-70% of all IT infrastructure, software, services, and technology spending will be cloud-based.Continue reading →

Finding the technology skillsets you need when you need them is getting tougher all the time, as my last post attests. If you’re like many enterprises, you’re engaging more than one staffing service in hopes of ending staff deficits.

For a long time, the most effective way for an organization to benefit from the power of IT required committing to a single vendor’s technology ecosystem.

You bought or leased the designated hardware on which you ran the designated software and, perhaps, a compatible service or two. But when you inevitably bumped into the limits of your chosen technology ecosystem, you faced a stark choice:

Either give up on that capability you were hoping to implement in the manner that would serve your business best — or alter the way your business operated in order to “sort of” get at least some of what you needed from the technology ecosystem in which you’d already invested plenty.

Typically, technology customization stayed out of reach and businesses were cornered into the second option, forced to adapt to the technology tools available rather than the other way around. Certainly, the ecosystem vendors didn’t mind, as customer lock-in proved extremely profitable.Continue reading →

But the cloud is a technology, not a solution that will automatically deliver benefits like faster time-to-market or streamlined methods or a fix for personnel or process issues within your enterprise.

Next, we advocate a know thyself approach. You’ll get the most out of a cloud implementation by understanding what you’re trying to accomplish. Be honest about your strengths and weaknesses.

If you’re certain about having access to the technical talent you’ll need to get from purchase to actual delivery of services, then go it alone.

If you’re less certain about what to do once you’ve ordered up servers and terabytes of data, you’ll want some help — which brings us to the last bit of advice: know thy cloud provider.

Cloud providers, like cloud computing itself, come in a dizzying array of options.

So don’t let a cloud provider tell you there’s only one way to get something done. Those vendors are trying to sell you their product rather than a solution that fits your business.

But you can in fact get exactly what you need without giving up the economies of scale the cloud promises. Ask a trusted technology advisor how.

If your enterprise is like most, the answer is VERY. And the chief reason centers on the rising importance of mobile “presence.” Without such presence, just about every business will soon struggle to compete.

Sometimes, however, not even a good mobile app is enough, because app users — which is to say, your customers — have become demanding. And picky.

There’s no question that information technology is changing the way everybody does business. I see this up-close daily as we help customers streamline IT operations as well as create and deploy innovative new digital capabilities.

As we watch dreams of mobility coming true around us every day, the appeal of desktop virtualization is obvious. Pile on seemingly perpetual Windows end-of-life concerns, and that appeal only grows.

VDI — virtual desktop infrastructure — enables enterprises to optimize costs by continuing use of legacy systems, while also running the latest applications and remotely publishing them to any device. Managing VDI is complex, however – the acquisition, care, and feeding of its infrastructure is costly and demands expertise many do not have.

Enter desktop virtualization services, which take VDI either wholly or partly into the cloud. Continue reading →